International trade via e-commerce is constantly growing nowadays. Efficient management of the e-commerce database is quite necessary to ensure that there is relevancy, consistency and 100 percent uptime for all customers. You do not want to lose out on customers due to any technical glitch during the massive sales or festive seasons. So, how can you achieve that? Read on.
Advantages of database load balancing
Load balancing refers to the practice of distributing different queries to multiple servers so that the load can be distributed evenly amongst them. When this is done at a database level, it is known as database load balancing. The SQL server performance improves as a whole. Likewise, the SQL traffic can be efficiently managed, which ensures that you get a high performance, application-level control and transactional integrity.
Flexibility
You can achieve great flexibility by using multiple load balanced servers for handling the site’s traffic. The administrators get the flexibility to perform maintenance on a server without impacting site uptime. You can direct all the traffic to one server and place the load balancers in the active/passive mode.
Redundancy
You can maintain one website on more than one web server using database load balancing. This will limit the impact of any kind of hardware failure as the website traffic will be automatically transferred to other web servers by the load balancer when one server fails. The load balancing technique can be used in either active/active mode or active/passive mode. By maintaining multiple load balanced servers, you can be assured that a working server will always be online to handle site traffic even in the case of hardware failure.
Scalability
E-commerce websites experience a massive surge during holiday seasons through a sudden influx of online visitors. If a website cannot handle the traffic, its performance will be severely affected. By implementing a load balancer, you can handle the sudden spike in traffic and distribute it across multiple servers. Thus, the advanced way helps in achieving scalability.
Data integrity
Database load balancing ensures that a query does not die in the middle of a transaction, thus achieving data and transactional integrity when there is a failover. The incoming queries can be held while the new primary takes over by leveraging the surge queue. This reduces application errors that normally occur during database failover.
Business growth
Database load balancing enhances SaaS performance as well as supports a scalable and robust infrastructure and increases the uptime. The traffic is balanced across the servers which maintain user functionality and experience. It also helps in monitoring the replication lag between the primary and secondary servers. These factors help the business grow.
Uptime and data consistency
It prevents downtime and application errors even when the users are still logged in and doing productive work. The database traffic can be routed through the downed servers. It can even be routed to multiple data centers for maximum uptime. Furthermore, data integrity and consistency are achieved with powerful failover capabilities. If a query dies in the middle of a transaction, an alert to retry the action is raised. By leveraging its surge queue, the incoming queries will be held in the queue as the new primary takes over.
Zero downtime
Downtime means loss of productivity, money and resources. When an error message is received in the middle of a transaction, it will lead to a downtime. Such error messages will decrease the number of completed transactions. With database load balancing, this can be reduced, achieving zero downtime.
Faster troubleshooting
You must have experienced a situation where the system is unable to handle the load and troubleshooting it takes time. Load balancing software offers analytics that provides real-time insight into the workload and traffic that runs across multiple servers. When you know which databases are consuming most resources, you can troubleshoot problems faster and efficiently without wasting too much time.
Control of workload flow
Database load balancing allows directing workflow to different servers. Through query routing, you can direct all the reporting or BI (business intelligence) workloads to designated reporting servers with ease. Further, it helps in continually keeping user access permissions up-to-date which helps in efficient management of the database.
The e-commerce world is very challenging, and it is not unusual for priorities to change suddenly. You should have the ability to address various issues and cater to the changing priorities. It is important to minimise and prevent critical business data loss and database replication while at the same time ensuring 100 percent uptime. You can achieve all this, along with an enhanced database performance through database load balancing. If you are an e-commerce site, you know what to do to deliver your promise of providing an excellent shopping experience to your customers.
